Like all of Archy Marshall’s music as King Krule, Man Alive! was recorded at night. It might explain the album’s dreamlike quality — some songs sound like writhing nightmares, while others loll about in an unsettled, half-asleep daze.
The anxieties that feed into it all are very real, though. The Peckham-raised 25-year-old often stands as a detached onlooker, simply observing the creeping gentrification of “middle class yobs”, or TV reports of the “men who’d drowned holding their daughters/And weren’t allowed refuge from the horrors”. Sometimes his gaze is entirely inward, contemplating his own lethargy: “Everything just seems to be numbness around.”
These turmoils manifest as spiky, bellicose cacophonies on Supermarché and Stoned Again, with off-kilter percussion and snarling vocals. On (Don’t Let The Dragon) Draag On, the vibe is far more sedate — too so, actually. Best is when the two moods collide, like on Perfecto Miserable, where the morose romanticism of Marshall’s lyrics sits uneasily amid seething guitars.
Marshall’s last record The Ooz was criticised for being too long. Man Alive! is leaner — at 40 minutes, it’s his shortest album — but it could be trimmed further still, leaving fewer ambles and more of that sullen intensity.
